“If you can’t beat them, join them”. So goes the old saying that is proving more true day-by-day in the pharma industry.  A few years ago it would have been unthinkable that Pfizer, the world’s largest pharma company, would ever dream of relying on generics for its future. But according to Reuters, that’s no longer the case, with David Simmons, a Pfizer executive, stating that the company plans to use licensing deals to make a strong advance into off-patent medicines, particularly hospital-based injectable drugs, both in developed and emerging markets.

Pfizer has been suffering in recent years from its products going off-patent with even larger losses looming ahead when its top seller, Lipitor (Atorvastatin - $12 billion-plus annual sales) goes off-patent in a few years. It is estimated that Pfizer could lose as much as $18bn in revenues between 2010-2014 due to Lipitor and a few other important products such as Geodon, Viagra, Celebrex going off-patent. According to BioFind, here is a complete list of Pfizer blockbusters going off-patent over the next decade :

Geodon 02-Mar-2012 (patent#4831031).
Viagra 27-Mar-2012 (patent#5,250,534).
Detrol 25-Mar-2012 (patent#5,382,600).
Tikosyn 25-Sep-2012 (patent#4,959,366).
Celebrex 30-May-2014
Zyvox on patent until 2013-2015, .
Macugen 19-May-2015 (patent#6,051,698).
Vfend 24-May-2016 (patent#5,567,817).
Relpax 26-Dec-2016 (patent#5,545,644).
Somavert 25-Mar-2017 (patent#5,849,535).
Spiriva 30-Jan-2018 .
Lyrica 30-Dec-2018 (patent#6,001,876) .
Chantix 10-May-2020 (patent#6,410,550).

Considering that Pfizer is also amongst the worst prepared big-pharma companies, as it does not seem to have a sufficient number of new blockbuster products in the pipeline to offset the revenue losses on these products, making this 180 degree turn and going after the generics market seems as one of the only sensible options left. We say; better late than never - if you’d like to discuss licensing Pfizer, we’ll be waiting for your call